A senior White House official was eager Thursday night to hear from a reporter on just how President Obama’s decision to pull 10,000 troops out of Afghanistan by year’s end was playing. “How do you think he did?” he asked at the fringe of Pakistani ambassador Husain Haqanni’s annual barbeque. “Well, Mullen and Petraeus were pretty …
President Obama
Five Questions on Ending the Afghan War
The always impertinent Tony Karon, over on our Global Spin blog, has some questions he wants President Obama to answer:
1. What will Obama tell the loved ones of Americans killed in Afghanistan in the next three years?
2. How does the U.S. persuade Afghan civilians or neighboring countries to do its bidding when it acknowledges its …
“Ten Years Gone”
That’s the title of a sour but thoughtful piece now up on Small Wars Journal:
As in Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan was lost before it was begun: it is lost because it cannot be won. Again our massive and superior military force is losing a campaign to a tough insurgent force. Again we are spending tens of billions overseas, and
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Quote of the Day
The President’s decisions are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept.
— Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in his prepared statement to the House Armed Services Committee Thursday morning, on the Afghan troop withdrawal announced by President Obama Wednesday evening
The Military Outlook in Afghanistan: Betting Against the Odds
The U.S. troop presence has peaked in Afghanistan at 101,000 and from here on out the Afghans will increasingly be on their own, President Obama made clear Wednesday night. The military challenge going forward is easy to describe, but tough to execute: can the fledgling Afghan national security forces — salted with corruption, …
Afghanistan: To Carry On, or Carrion?
After a decade of war in Afghanistan, the battle lines — at least among the activists — are clearly drawn. The usual suspects have been rolling out their voice boxes atop soapboxes to explain, in advance of President Obama’s speech Wednesday night, why we must keep fighting, or come home. Few fall in-between.
This is what …
21st Century Duck-and-Cover
I can remember the first time I came to Washington some 35 years ago and walked around the White House, protected from the outside world by a freshly-black-painted, wrought-iron fence. I recall doing that not so long ago. I did it again Tuesday afternoon, at least on the Pennsylvania Avenue side. But down by the South Lawn I was …
The Looming Taliban Two-Step
The White House has announced that President Obama on June 22 is going to reveal the way forward in Afghanistan — which, boiled down, means how many of the 100,000 U.S. troops now there will be coming home in short order. Then, some 24 hours later, the Senate Intelligence Committee plans to hold a confirmation hearing for General …
Future grand strategists speak: Why US withdrawal from Afghanistan would stabilize Pakistan
In my continuing role as Head Judge for the online strategy community Wikistrat‘s month-long International Grand Strategy Competition featuring roughly 30 teams from top-flight universities and think tanks around the world, I get to peruse all manner of provocative thought from some of tomorrow’s best and brightest thinkers. And …
Afghanistan: A “Strategy of Tactics”?
Tom Barnett raised some eyebrows Wednesday with his grim prognosis on Battleland on the U.S. role in Afghanistan:
It’s a dependency – pure and simple. The longer we stay, the more we’ll infantilize the system. Ten years in and virtually everything we’ve set about to create is still described as “fragile” – meaning it collapses and
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Haunted by Homicide: Federal Grand Jury Investigates War Crimes and Torture in Death of ‘the Iceman’ at Abu Ghraib, Plus Other Alleged CIA Abuses
Former colleague and TIME contributor Adam Zagorin breaks news here on Battleland with exclusive reporting on the latest federal action over the infamous death of “the Iceman” at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003:
By Adam Zagorin
It has been nearly a decade since Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi prisoner known as “the Iceman” — for …
Obama and Palestine
Bandol, France
Attached herewith is an important essay on the long term implications of the Netanyahu – Obama spectacle of late May. The author, William R. Polk, has kindly granted me permission to distribute it.
Polk is one of the most knowledgeable observers of the Middle East as well as the general politics of
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Panetta: `Blizzard’…or Snow Job?
“We are no longer in the Cold War,” Leon Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing Thursday. “This is more like the blizzard war, a blizzard of challenges that draw speed and intensity from terrorism, from rapidly developing technologies and the rising number of powers on the world stage.”
USA …